A note about what isn’t in this roundup: Nothing about the midterms or crypto/FTX. I wrote about Twitter earlier this week. The midterms are better covered elsewhere, I do not have anything unique to say about them. As for the situation with FTX, it is rapidly developing and I do not yet feel I have sufficient handle on it that saying things would be net helpful. I continue to recommend starting on that topic by
To play devil's advocate for a minute on the cheating question: whether a lower confidence level is acceptable depends on, among other things, (a) the false positive rate of whatever test is used, and (b) people's confidence in the test used (potentially related to the former, but not the same).
a) It's not just the false positive rate that matters, but how much it can be influenced, i.e. if you can fool the test into thinking your opponent is a cheater. One clear example is the long and troubled saga of Amazon product reviews: when Amazon finally started cracking down on sellers giving themselves fake reviews and ratings to boost their spot in search, sellers immediately pivoted to giving their *competitors* fake reviews and rankings so Amazon would ban the competitors.
b) If a story like the above can be told convincingly (not necessarily dependent on whether or not it's true), the public stops believing the test and its confidence levels altogether. The cheaters are, of course, highly motivated to figure out a way to accomplish this.
On the Florida roofer, this came up on Hacker News and the original justification for this "during an emergency" license restriction was discussed -- it seems FL has a bunch of special building code requirements due to all the hurricanes, and a recurring problem was out-of-state roofers coming in after a disaster, charging folks to do work that's not up to code, and then being out of range for liability when the roof flies off in the next hurricane.
I found this sufficiently surprising that I thought it worth sharing. Doesn't nullify the concerns you raise, but I think it does cast things in a bit more sympathetic light, rather than the simple "corrupt legislators in the pockets of business cartels" narrative. That can also be true of course, but better to know the benefits as well as the costs when weighing them.
(License mobility might help here, though part of the reason why construction licenses aren't portable is that every state has different codes, and getting licensed is a lot to do with knowing very low-level implementation details on those codes. Unless you go all the way and abolish/harmonize building codes, it's not clear that license portability makes sense.)
Another supportive point for your view on cheating is that even a very low population of cheaters within a game will mean that the top ranks are saturated with cheaters. I play in an invite-only online trivia league (coincidentally popular with the Magic community) with ~26,000 members, you may be familiar with it.
The questions are easily Google-able, so all that keeps people honest is the honor system. But if even 0.1% of players regularly cheat in a way meant to keep them near the top but not at an implausible level, >50% of the top 50 players will be cheaters. The league has had various cheating scandals in the past and the championship rounds have to be proctored to prevent cheaters from taking over.
> The provisions of section 489.113(3), Florida Statutes, are suspended to the following extent: a certified or registered general, building, or residential contractor is not required to subcontract roofing work for the repair and installation of any roof type;
> The provisions of section 489.117, Florida Statues, are suspended to the extent that registered contractors are not subject to the geographic scope limitations or requirements as provided in section 489.117(1)(b) and (c), Florida Statues, when providing contracting services within the aforementioned counties. Registered contractors shall provide their state registration, proof of compliance with applicable workers' compensation as required by Chapter 440, Florida Statues, and liability and property damage insurance as required by section 489.115(5)(a), Florida Statues, to the jurisdiction in which the work is being performed. Additionally, registered contractors working outside the geographical scope of their registration in compliance with this order are not guilty of unlicensed contracting, as defined in section 489.13(1), Florida Statues, for the time period that this order is in effect...
>(b) Registration allows the registrant to engage in contracting only in the counties, municipalities, or development districts where he or she has complied with all local licensing requirements and only for the type of work covered by the registration.
>(c) Each registrant shall report to the board each local jurisdiction and each category of registration in which the registrant holds a certificate of competency or license, or where the registrant has been granted a certificate of competency or license by reciprocal agreement, for which registration is required by this part, within 30 days after obtaining such certificate or license.
Given how the DBPR order is being interpreted by authorities, I'm guessing their intent was to allow for portability between Florida counties/municipalities/development districts and not states.
But it's not crystal clear in the text of the order that this was the intent. People from other states especially might not be aware that Florida licensing isn't state-wide.
On paper suggestions: A really good study on otherwise-similar pairs of countries with large gaps in costs and performance (e.g. comparing Korea to Japan or Switzerland to Germany) might be good.
There are (to my knowledge) two main types of studies in this space - ENO has this recent study that does shallow dives on a large set of countries (https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/report/), and Alon Levy's transitcosts projects has a bunch of in-depth case studies on specific cities or countries. But I've realized I don't really have a good answer to "what does Korea do so much better than Japan" (their typical costs per km are about 50% or less of Japan's), and doing a direct comparison like this might be an unusually good way of figuring out things to improve.
(Another thing that I'm not aware of is good analysis of infrastructure cost drivers for other types of infrastructure, like roads or sewer systems, but I haven't looked much into that and it's likely that there's a bunch of good studies I'm just not aware of).
After a long break, I started playing Magic again on Arena right before the pandemic started. I haven't played in person hardly at all. (just a few pre-releases). I'd love to play in person again but I really don't want to buy (or re-buy) all the cards for any decks I already have on Arena. What I would like to do is bring my laptop and play people in person on Arena. Sort of like LAN parties. After playing so much Arena over the last two years, having to handle all the rules, triggers, tokens, ETB effects etc manually seems like such a chore. But I miss playing in person. And I like standard. I just don't want to have to start by spending $400-$1000 to play.
On vacant storefronts: there was recently a proposition in local SF elections to tax vacant __homes__, rather than commercial storefronts. This made me uncomfortable, since the actual legal wording wasn't rigorously-targeted at only Those Greedy Developers And Landlords...plus I take the view that vacant housing is net good, since that's free tax revenue for the local government with ~zero consumption of local services or commons. (Especially so-called "luxury" housing, which, c'mon. No one's gonna give that away to the homeless or demolish to downzone for plebians.)
Feels different with commercial properties though. Those tend to be rather long leases, costly to break in many ways; average homeownership duration is, what, less than 10 years before moving again, I seem to recall? But businesses turning over that fast is super disruptive. So making sure a potential tenant is actually a good long-term fit seems extra super important. (Though, admittedly, urban blight is a huge minus too.) Perhaps an alternative to vacancy taxes would be making shorter-term leases easier, or other forms of "temporary" commercial renting...I'm always a bit pleased around Halloween time, when otherwise-vacant lots and storefronts suddenly become pumpkin patches and Spirit costume stores for a bit. At least __someone__ is getting value out of that land, some sort of mutually beneficial trade is happening. More of that might be nice.
I got into MtG pretty late, just within the last few months. Not too familiar with the history or meta, so this is a total newbie's take...but I have to say that, what kept me away for decades was the overwhelming $ barrier to entry + spiralling complexity. New formats like Commander are significantly more welcoming, cheaper, and I agree with the general design decision that it's just more fun to see greater variety of cards actually played (which also allows more design space, since it's not everyone running 4 copies of Lightning Bolt or whatever all the time). To the extent that a game dies without getting new players to join, it's valuable to attract new players with such reforms. (I don't think this excuses power creep, though.)
Fully concede that card siloing is unhealthy though. Less of an issue in digital formats, but bafflingly there's still never been a Really Good version of that for MtG. So I will continue to not own any cards which rely on having multiple copies of same name, while Standard players don't own any Commanders. And so it goes. Moves product, splinters community. Sometimes I like to imagine what it'd be like to run an ideal game with no annoying need to make profits...
Idle curiosity, but how should vacancy taxes on businesses avoid straw leases?
Your brother in law rents the space for a dollar a month to sell expensive dryer lint, or draw stick figures on commission. Or you as owner offer $20 bottles of water out of a crate and a golden tee machine.
You might empower regulators to "deem" something vacant. DC does this for housing, but you still might see vaguely plausible space fillers for commercial.
Best guess regulators would just look for the most common dodges like with any other regime and try to police those.
To play devil's advocate for a minute on the cheating question: whether a lower confidence level is acceptable depends on, among other things, (a) the false positive rate of whatever test is used, and (b) people's confidence in the test used (potentially related to the former, but not the same).
a) It's not just the false positive rate that matters, but how much it can be influenced, i.e. if you can fool the test into thinking your opponent is a cheater. One clear example is the long and troubled saga of Amazon product reviews: when Amazon finally started cracking down on sellers giving themselves fake reviews and ratings to boost their spot in search, sellers immediately pivoted to giving their *competitors* fake reviews and rankings so Amazon would ban the competitors.
b) If a story like the above can be told convincingly (not necessarily dependent on whether or not it's true), the public stops believing the test and its confidence levels altogether. The cheaters are, of course, highly motivated to figure out a way to accomplish this.
On the Florida roofer, this came up on Hacker News and the original justification for this "during an emergency" license restriction was discussed -- it seems FL has a bunch of special building code requirements due to all the hurricanes, and a recurring problem was out-of-state roofers coming in after a disaster, charging folks to do work that's not up to code, and then being out of range for liability when the roof flies off in the next hurricane.
I found this sufficiently surprising that I thought it worth sharing. Doesn't nullify the concerns you raise, but I think it does cast things in a bit more sympathetic light, rather than the simple "corrupt legislators in the pockets of business cartels" narrative. That can also be true of course, but better to know the benefits as well as the costs when weighing them.
(License mobility might help here, though part of the reason why construction licenses aren't portable is that every state has different codes, and getting licensed is a lot to do with knowing very low-level implementation details on those codes. Unless you go all the way and abolish/harmonize building codes, it's not clear that license portability makes sense.)
Another supportive point for your view on cheating is that even a very low population of cheaters within a game will mean that the top ranks are saturated with cheaters. I play in an invite-only online trivia league (coincidentally popular with the Magic community) with ~26,000 members, you may be familiar with it.
The questions are easily Google-able, so all that keeps people honest is the honor system. But if even 0.1% of players regularly cheat in a way meant to keep them near the top but not at an implausible level, >50% of the top 50 players will be cheaters. The league has had various cheating scandals in the past and the championship rounds have to be proctored to prevent cheaters from taking over.
Here's the emergency order on roof contractor requirements in Florida: http://www.myfloridalicense.com/DBPR/os/documents/Emergency%20Order%202022-03.pdf
Relevant bits:
> The provisions of section 489.113(3), Florida Statutes, are suspended to the following extent: a certified or registered general, building, or residential contractor is not required to subcontract roofing work for the repair and installation of any roof type;
> The provisions of section 489.117, Florida Statues, are suspended to the extent that registered contractors are not subject to the geographic scope limitations or requirements as provided in section 489.117(1)(b) and (c), Florida Statues, when providing contracting services within the aforementioned counties. Registered contractors shall provide their state registration, proof of compliance with applicable workers' compensation as required by Chapter 440, Florida Statues, and liability and property damage insurance as required by section 489.115(5)(a), Florida Statues, to the jurisdiction in which the work is being performed. Additionally, registered contractors working outside the geographical scope of their registration in compliance with this order are not guilty of unlicensed contracting, as defined in section 489.13(1), Florida Statues, for the time period that this order is in effect...
And here's 489.117(b) and (c): http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0400-0499/0489/Sections/0489.117.html
>(b) Registration allows the registrant to engage in contracting only in the counties, municipalities, or development districts where he or she has complied with all local licensing requirements and only for the type of work covered by the registration.
>(c) Each registrant shall report to the board each local jurisdiction and each category of registration in which the registrant holds a certificate of competency or license, or where the registrant has been granted a certificate of competency or license by reciprocal agreement, for which registration is required by this part, within 30 days after obtaining such certificate or license.
Given how the DBPR order is being interpreted by authorities, I'm guessing their intent was to allow for portability between Florida counties/municipalities/development districts and not states.
But it's not crystal clear in the text of the order that this was the intent. People from other states especially might not be aware that Florida licensing isn't state-wide.
On paper suggestions: A really good study on otherwise-similar pairs of countries with large gaps in costs and performance (e.g. comparing Korea to Japan or Switzerland to Germany) might be good.
There are (to my knowledge) two main types of studies in this space - ENO has this recent study that does shallow dives on a large set of countries (https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/report/), and Alon Levy's transitcosts projects has a bunch of in-depth case studies on specific cities or countries. But I've realized I don't really have a good answer to "what does Korea do so much better than Japan" (their typical costs per km are about 50% or less of Japan's), and doing a direct comparison like this might be an unusually good way of figuring out things to improve.
(Another thing that I'm not aware of is good analysis of infrastructure cost drivers for other types of infrastructure, like roads or sewer systems, but I haven't looked much into that and it's likely that there's a bunch of good studies I'm just not aware of).
After a long break, I started playing Magic again on Arena right before the pandemic started. I haven't played in person hardly at all. (just a few pre-releases). I'd love to play in person again but I really don't want to buy (or re-buy) all the cards for any decks I already have on Arena. What I would like to do is bring my laptop and play people in person on Arena. Sort of like LAN parties. After playing so much Arena over the last two years, having to handle all the rules, triggers, tokens, ETB effects etc manually seems like such a chore. But I miss playing in person. And I like standard. I just don't want to have to start by spending $400-$1000 to play.
>What do you do at an office job? (3 minute video)
I think this tweet is gone
On vacant storefronts: there was recently a proposition in local SF elections to tax vacant __homes__, rather than commercial storefronts. This made me uncomfortable, since the actual legal wording wasn't rigorously-targeted at only Those Greedy Developers And Landlords...plus I take the view that vacant housing is net good, since that's free tax revenue for the local government with ~zero consumption of local services or commons. (Especially so-called "luxury" housing, which, c'mon. No one's gonna give that away to the homeless or demolish to downzone for plebians.)
Feels different with commercial properties though. Those tend to be rather long leases, costly to break in many ways; average homeownership duration is, what, less than 10 years before moving again, I seem to recall? But businesses turning over that fast is super disruptive. So making sure a potential tenant is actually a good long-term fit seems extra super important. (Though, admittedly, urban blight is a huge minus too.) Perhaps an alternative to vacancy taxes would be making shorter-term leases easier, or other forms of "temporary" commercial renting...I'm always a bit pleased around Halloween time, when otherwise-vacant lots and storefronts suddenly become pumpkin patches and Spirit costume stores for a bit. At least __someone__ is getting value out of that land, some sort of mutually beneficial trade is happening. More of that might be nice.
I got into MtG pretty late, just within the last few months. Not too familiar with the history or meta, so this is a total newbie's take...but I have to say that, what kept me away for decades was the overwhelming $ barrier to entry + spiralling complexity. New formats like Commander are significantly more welcoming, cheaper, and I agree with the general design decision that it's just more fun to see greater variety of cards actually played (which also allows more design space, since it's not everyone running 4 copies of Lightning Bolt or whatever all the time). To the extent that a game dies without getting new players to join, it's valuable to attract new players with such reforms. (I don't think this excuses power creep, though.)
Fully concede that card siloing is unhealthy though. Less of an issue in digital formats, but bafflingly there's still never been a Really Good version of that for MtG. So I will continue to not own any cards which rely on having multiple copies of same name, while Standard players don't own any Commanders. And so it goes. Moves product, splinters community. Sometimes I like to imagine what it'd be like to run an ideal game with no annoying need to make profits...
Idle curiosity, but how should vacancy taxes on businesses avoid straw leases?
Your brother in law rents the space for a dollar a month to sell expensive dryer lint, or draw stick figures on commission. Or you as owner offer $20 bottles of water out of a crate and a golden tee machine.
You might empower regulators to "deem" something vacant. DC does this for housing, but you still might see vaguely plausible space fillers for commercial.
Best guess regulators would just look for the most common dodges like with any other regime and try to police those.